About 80sTees.com

About Us

The Basics

In business since January of 2000

Located in North Huntingdon, PA (near Pittsburgh)

14 Full Time employees, 3 part time employees, lots of seasonal employees

What makes us special?

We try harder. Being average is not acceptable to any of our employees

We treat our customers the way we would want to be treated.

Unmatched quality control. We inspect every single one of our t-shirts for flaws. No one else does that.

Front Row (from left to right): Brianne, Brian (Doc), Lee
Back Row: Brady, Michael, Brian M, Jaime G, Deanna, Christine, Dyan, Mic, Jaime M, Kevin
Not pictured: Mary Ellen, Sue, Kim R (offsite), Jason G (offsite)

About the Founder

The history of 80sTees.com used to begin with the summer of 1999. But then we had the idea of getting pictures of our employees playing with an 80s toy when they were a kid (if they were kids in the 80s!). As our founder was looking through pictures at his parents house he realized that he was always wearing printed shirts! And to top that off his mom even made him a birthday cake with an outline of a t-shirt on it when he was a kid. He has always loved t-shirts! Here are some pictures showing our founder, Kevin Stecko, wearing some original 80sTees.

The business idea started in the summer of 1999. Kevin Stecko, the company founder, wore a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe t-shirt to Kennywood, a Pittsburgh amusement park. Throughout the day many people approached Kevin and asked “where did you get that shirt?”.

Upon graduation Kevin had a few weeks to kill before starting his new job for an environmental consulting firm, so he made a deal to bulk purchase some retro shirts from the small store in State College, PA, where he bought his original shirt. He began by selling Transformers, ThunderCats, Care Bears, and Strawberry ShortCake t-shirts on Ebay. After the first He-Man shirt sold for over $30.00, he knew he had stumbled onto something that people wanted to buy!

He then began selling shirts at http://www.80sTees.com, but originally only accepted personal checks and money orders. Our first electronic payment method was PayPal, which allows individuals to send money via credit card. PayPal is very popular among Ebay users, but was an inconvenience for those people not already a member. We now accept all major credit cards, PayPal, and check/money orders.

In 2003, we upgraded our site and added features such as a gift certificates, coupons, and a site wide search engine. In January of 2005 we added an industry leading site search and navigation tool. You can now shop our site and see only the items that match your profile. You can search based on your gender, size, your favorite characters, or even how recently we added the items!

As of February 16th, 2006 we've launched our redesigned site. Our redesign is just the beginning of continuous improvements we will make to the site to make it easier for our users.

Where do you get those wonderful shirts?

Just as the joker wondered where Batman gets all his wonderful toys, many people also wonder where we get our t-shirts.

80sTees does not own the rights to the characters/licenses of the characters we sell. Rather, we buy the shirts wholesale from the license holders. For instance, we buy our Star Wars shirts from a company that has an agreement with George Lucas. The company we buy from pays George Lucas a royalty for every shirt they sell to us.

Providing a License to Wear

We do have a few license agreements that allow us to produce our own t-shirts. That is why our selection of Top Gun t-shirts is the best on the web. As we grow we will try to add even more licenses so that we can continue to offer the best selection of licensed t-shirts on the web.

80sTees in the media

It's likely that you have seen one of our many print advertisements in magazines such as Maxim, US Weekly, Rolling Stone, In Touch, etc.

Our shirts have been featured in the following TV shows and movies:

Everybody Loves Raymond (Batman shirt worn by Chris Elliot)
Blade: Trinity (Lost Boys shirt worn by punk kid who attacks Jessica Biel)
Good Morning America Valentines Day (Joel Siegel gave a Jake Ryan shirt to a weekend anchor for a Valentine's Day segment on romantic movies)
Stacy Keibler requested our shirts for a photo shoot for Sole Collector magazine. At the time Stacy was known for being a WWE wrestler, but now she has shot to fame with her success on the ABC show Dancing with the Stars. She appeared in a Rainbow Brite shirts and Jem and the Holograms shirts.
MTV2 VJ Jim Shearer has requested and worn 80sTees' shirts
Wild Hogs: Tim Allen's character wore our Who Made Who AC/DC t-shirt

About the President

Kevin Stecko was born in 1977, and grew up with practically all the characters and titles we sell. He graduated in 1999 from Penn State University with a Bachelor of Science in Geo-Environmental Engineering.

Kevin, why sell 80's shirts?

My favorite toys of the 80s were, by far, the Masters of the Universe collection. One day at Penn State I walked by a little shop and saw a He-Man t-shirt. Amazing! I bought the shirt and immediately it was my favorite t-shirt. When I would wear the shirt at any kind of public place people would always ask me where I bought it. So I decided that these shirts obviously were not easy enough to find, and I changed that by creating 80sTees.com.

You will notice that we have lots of non-80s shirts as well. We have evolved our product line to include some of our favorite pop-culture items, even if they aren't from the 80s! We are big fans of The Office and Family Guy, and some older stuff like Sanford and Son and MASH.